Should we deprecate the compat and encoding constructor arguments?

[jhamman]

In #1170 (comment), @shoyer writes:

...I would consider deprecating the encoding argument to DataArray instead. It would also make sense to get rid of the compat argument to Dataset.

These extra arguments are not part of the fundamental xarray data model and thus are a little distracting, especially to new users.

@pydata/xarray and others, what do we think about deprecating the compat argument to the Dataset constructor and the encoding arguement to the DataArray (and Dataset via #1170).

[fmaussion]

I don't have an opinion on compat (seems somehow unrelated to netCDF and #1170?), but I am +1 on encode. I always use encode when writing a dataset to disk, not at construction.

[clarkfitzg]

I haven't used these arguments in the constructors. But I don't find them distracting either.

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[max-sixty]

Compat is removed; is there a basis for keeping encoding?

[shoyer]

We still have compat as an argument to Dataset.__ini__.

I think we should probably deprecate it. I've never used it, and if you really want that high a level of control you can easily substitute using merge() instead.